The Dog Hermit - Hardcover

Stout, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892965037 ISBN 13: 9780892965038

Publisher: Mysterious Press, 1993

Synopsis

Long Creek wasn't exactly the ideal spot to spend Thanksgiving weekend. Hard times had turned Hill County's once-thriving mill towns into poor, isolated, angry little hamlets. Yet Richard Brokaw, the wealthy cable television entrepreneur, had chosen to make his home there. And now his nine-year-old son, Jamie, has been brutally kidnapped.
The Bessemer Gazette hastily dispatches a veteran reporter to cover the story. But when he dies in what appears to be a drunk-driving accident, Executive Editor Will Shafer is called out of the warmth of a family holiday. With his reportorial skills rusty from long disuse, he is plunged into the bitter cold of an upstate New York winter, into the desperate search for a missing boy, and the baffling circumstances of a mentor's death.
Obsessed by elusive inconsistencies, following fragile threads that are cut short by yet another fatal accident, Shafer is stonewalled by hostile local police even as an old friend, an FBI agent, draws him into the center of the kidnapping investigation. As the two join forces to ferret out clues in the ransom notes, the readiness of the child's father to meet the kidnappers' rising demands raises disturbing questions. Is money really the issue? Do impoverished neighbors resent the wealthy man living in their midst? Or is the kidnapping yet another vicious tactic in the Brokaws' bitter divorce and custody battle?
The facts continue to confound Shafer and as the search intensifies, Jamie's harrowing ordeal takes a terrifying new twist. Deep in the snowbound wilderness, Jamie is delivered from his abductors into the hands of a man tormented by tragic memories...a man who may be even less willing to let him go. And, as events build to an explosive climax, Will Shafer - with far more at stake than an exclusive story - crosses the line between journalistic objectivity and deadly danger to discover just how far he will go...just how much he will risk to track down the chilling truth behind the kidnapping and corner a savage killer.

About this title

Reviews

Stout, the author of Night of the Ice Storm and the Edgar-winning Carolina Skeletons , here completes a hat trick of crack crime fiction. As in Storm , the cold wastes of upstate New York serve as a remote, socio-economic wasteland, where newspaper editor Will Schafer hunts for a missing boy and the key to an old friend's suspicious death. Reporter Fran Spicer is covering the abduction of five-year-old Jamie Brokaw when his car crashes on a snowy road; his death is attributed to alcohol. Meanwhile two ransom demands are delivered to Jamie's wealthy, divorced parents, and the cops and the FBI converge on fictional Hill County. Despite the ransom payments, the boy isn't returned. Deep in the forest, a physically and emotionally scarred hermit who lives with his dog hears a child's voice in the darkness and is drawn from his private torment into the middle of the crime, with startling results. Stout's forte is gentle understatement and the ability to merge site and characters in seamless scenes of quiet terror. The entranced reader watches as Will, intent on vindicating Fran, finds new purpose as a newspaper man and falls for a local woman, all the while remaining isolated, an alien in an unfriendly town. The canny, breathless ending, which may be too neat in smoothing every last nihilistic edge, nevertheless elicits the reader's deep sign of relief.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mysterious Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0892965037
• ISBN 13: 9780892965038
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 311